Out of boredom, Loki pulled out Sesame, the fortune cookie. He put it on the dashboard and asked it where to go. He knew where he was going, but he needed Sesame to encourage him even more. He trusted it more than anything lately.
“Wait,” he said to Sesame. “That’s not the right question. My question is: Should I kill the vampire Snow White? Is that really what I need to do to go back home?” Loki asked and crushed Sesame open.
The gummy paper read: Kill Snow White.
Loki took the paper and started chewing it. It tasted of vanilla. A bit sour, though.
Suddenly, Carmen’s radio came back to life. The presenter in the radio introduced a band called the Pumpkin Warriors. They sang a tune called ‘Nothing is going to stop us now.’ The lyrics went something like this:
We will hit the road together,
Together and forever,
Nothing’s going to stop us now.
And that was it. The same three sentences over and over again. The music was uplifting and cheerful, though. Loki thought the Pumpkin Warriors were much better than the Sweet Pickleheads or the Piedpipers. He started tapping his fingers on the wheel again and singing along.
A few miles later, a cold chill filled the air outside, and a fog began crawling like sneaky ghosts above the ground. The fog was thickening, covering the Cadillac and the road ahead.
Loki saw a wooden sign on the right side of the road. He arched his back and squinted at it, afraid to miss it due to the thick-as-pea-soup fog. The sign read:
Welcome to Hell
Only a few more miles to Sorrow
5
The Train of Consequences
Loki rolled down the windows and locked the doors as the Pumpkin Warriors announced they’d stop playing for the night. They said it was becoming too cold and foggy for their liking, but that they’d come back later when it warmed up a bit.
“See ya later, Loki,” one of them said from the radio.
Loki wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t the first time a member of one of the bands that played on Carmen’s radio had talked to him. He just wanted to focus on the road ahead.
The foggy surroundings oozed with creepy anticipation like a dark ride in an abandoned amusement park. Loki expected something to pop out of the fog at any moment.
“If you think you should go back, now would be the time,” one of the Pumpkin Warriors’ members told Loki. “It looks like there is no turning back from here.”
Loki slammed the on/off button of the radio with the palm of his hand. “The last thing I need is advice from the dead,” he mumbled.
“Ouch,” the band members said before the radio’s light dimmed into darkness.
Loki drove on, reminding himself that he was a Dreamhunter, and that he should be brave.
A minute later, something glittered in the fog.
It was huge gate, blocking the road. Loki stopped the Cadillac, wiping the sultry fog off the window with his hand. The gate was the shape of a whale’s mouth with what looked like vampire fangs drawn out.
Loki supposed it was the way to cross over to Sorrow. He wondered how such an expensive looking gate existed in the middle of nowhere.
A figure shrouded in the shadows appeared from behind the gate, as if it had just passed through like a ghost. It was approaching Loki.
The figure was of a hunched man in a black tuxedo, wearing what looked like a magician’s hat. He looked like a twisted version of a circus ringmaster, and he stopped in front of the Cadillac.
Although Loki couldn’t see the hunchback’s face clearly through the fog, he noticed a silver tooth, gleaming in the dark. Loki supposed the dwarf-like man was smiling at him, but he wondered which kind of smile it was. There were smiles, and then there were smiles—the latter were the worst. Loki tucked his Alicorn in the back of his jeans and walked out to meet the bizarre, hunchbacked man.
“Excuse me, is this the way to Sorrow?” he pointed at the gate.
“It depends,” the hunchback said, resting with his hands on his cane.
“Depends on what?” Loki asked politely.
“On how much you desire going there,” the hunchback said.
“Very much,” Loki plastered his two-time-academy-award-winning-smile on his face.
“How much is very much?” the hunchback said, his sound implying mockery.
Loki wasn’t going to answer that. Things were getting absurd, and he just wanted to cross over. “I haven’t caught your name,” he offered, diverting from the silly conversation.
“My name is Magnificent,” his silver tooth gleamed, “Igor, the Magnificent.”
“Oh,” Loki said. “You’re the one who called me to come to Sorrow—“
“I know who I am,” Igor snickered. “The question, is do you know who you are?”
Loki said nothing. It was an unsettling question.
“You don’t have to answer that,” Igor said. “What you need to know is that if it’s your first time coming to Sorrow, then this whale’s mouth is the only way in.”
“Is that some kind of a special treatment for those who enter for the first time?”
“Something like that.”